Just Killing Time (8 page)

I
walked down the stairs, with the chief following close behind. Pat's face fell when he saw him.

“I just hung up from a call with Caroline,” I said, pretending not to notice the staring contest between Chief Paisley and Pat. Neither man acknowledged the other, nor did they seem inclined to.

“What's all of this?” I asked, pointing to a mop and bucket and a roll of paper towels.

“Thought I would clean up a bit,” Pat said.

I looked around and saw the jumbled boxes, the fine film of dust, and smudges of what I assumed was fingerprint powder. I hadn't noticed all of that last night in the lower light. I noticed a new box of paperwork on the counter.

“What's that?” I asked.

“Ask him,” Pat said.

“I brought this over earlier this morning.” Chief Paisley picked up one of the sheets. “This is all of the paperwork collected the morning of the incident. We've made copies of it all, and I wanted to give it to you since you're here now. And it's your shop now, from what I understand.”

“You don't need this?” I said. “I thought you were still investigating.”

“Thom's death continues to be an open investigation. As does the theft of the clocks last month. By law, we could keep everything and lock down this building. But a year in Orchard has taught me a few things, and one of them is shutting down a business, even for a few days, doesn't serve the community.”

“Wonder how you figured that out?” Pat said under his breath, loud enough for us both to hear.

The silence that followed was icy, so I jumped in.

“Thanks for bringing the cleaning supplies, Pat. It's probably a good idea. Let me just change my jacket.”

“No, Ruthie, I can clean up down here. How about if you take the box of papers upstairs and try to make some sense of them. Take the calendar. Make sure we're not missing anything important.”

“I don't know if I could be much help with sorting the files,” I said as I looked through the box. There were scraps of paper, invoices, and dozens of four-by-six index cards.

“You at least speak the language on them,” Chief Paisley said. “Warning wheels, J levers, strike release pins? Some of these look like orders, others seem to be invoices, or repairs that need to be done. There might be something there that could help reconstruct what Thom was working on that night.”

I looked around the shop. “Do you have jobs in the shop in addition to the estate sale work?”

Pat nodded. “We had a few jobs that were ready to be picked up, so I've been delivering them. And there were a few outstanding jobs. I could do a few of them, but most need you to look at them, Ruthie. I don't feel confident in doing the work myself.”

“Have you become a clockmaker?” I said, smiling.

“An apprentice of sorts.” Pat laughed. “Sounds crazy at my age, but Thom was giving me more and more jobs to do on my own, and then he'd look them over. With this much inventory, it was all hands on deck.”

“I will look them over. But first, Pat, would you walk me through the inventory system one more time?”

“Fascinating as that sounds, I am going to leave you both to it. Nice to meet you, Ms. Clagan,” Chief Paisley said. “Pat, you take care.”

“See you soon, Chief,” Pat said, not sounding thrilled at the prospect.

“Oh, you can count on that,” the chief said. He stared at Pat for a few more seconds. Pat, to his credit, did not blink or look away. I totally would have folded.

“What's that all about?” I asked after the door closed behind the chief.

“I had some outstanding parking tickets and the chief threatened to throw me in jail. He's very by the book, mildly put. Anyway, let's not talk about him. Let me show you the new system we've set up. I think you may be impressed. At least I hope so.”

Pat turned to the laptop on the counter. “This isn't completely paper free, but we're trying. See that number in the
corner of this index card? That's the coding system Caroline used, the one I showed you this morning. On the clocks that are in for repair, you'll see a blue piece of painter's tape on clocks with that number. Once the repair is done, we put a Cog & Sprocket tag on the clock and include that number on it. Anyway, the number goes here in the database. And then we fill out the rest of the information as we find it. The type of clock, the maker, the history of it—”

“The repairs needed. The repairs made. The owner of the clock. That's terrific. Lots of information,” I finished.

Pat nodded and said, “Levi Adler, Caroline's son, says he will work on it some more over the holidays. But for right now, it's been a great way to start to work on all of the new inventory, since the Chairman kept a lot of these records on a spreadsheet already.”

“Are you taking pictures of the clocks?”

“Another Levi project.”

“Is the database on a network?” I asked.

“Another Levi project,” we both said at the same time. I smiled. Baby steps. At least there was a computer system. Sort of.

“How about tracking payments on repairs?” I tried.

“Well, Ruthie, I'm going to let you down on that. See this button here? That's what you click to print an invoice. Course, the computer and the printer need to be connected. Which is a whole other project. Caroline usually takes care of that. Anyway, once the invoice is printed, we're back to paper. We use the ledger, this one here, for the rest of the journey.”

Pat handed me a ledger that looked like it was from the early 1900s. “You put the number in this column, a bit of a description, customer name, and amount due. Then you
highlight the amount due in yellow and put it with the clock. Once it's paid, you—”

“Mark it paid with a red check.”

I opened up the ledger and ran my finger along the familiar handwriting. I looked at the beginning of the ledger. Nineteen ninety-five. Two decades of the Clagan family business all in one book. I shivered a bit.

“Cold?” Pat asked.

“A little, I guess,” I said.

“I've got the air on, trying to get it cleared up a bit for Caroline. Makes it chilly. You want to borrow a jacket?” There were wooden pegs on the wall by the back door, and several work shirts and jackets hung there. Pat walked over and picked up a blue and black wool shirt, handing it to me. I held it up to my face. It smelled of machine oil, Brut, pipe smoke, and pancakes. It smelled like my grandfather. I breathed it in, hoping my tears wouldn't dilute the scent.

“So, where are you with the inventory back here? Can we move some of this stuff around?” I asked, pulling the shirt over my shoulders.

“Absolutely. Caroline thought we should wait until you got here to organize it all. It would give you a chance to look things over at the same time.”

“Does she want to be here too?”

“Your store now, from what I understand.”

I nodded. “I know that's awkward, since I haven't been here for a while.”

“No, it's right. It does my heart good to think of you running the old place. You are going to run it, aren't you?”

“Me? Oh wow. I don't know what I'm going to do. I have a life, sort of, back in Boston.” Boston felt so far away. I'd
been staying in Steve and Rick's guest room for months, ever since the separation. Half of my belongings were in storage. Was it really a life? Or a holding pattern?

“Pat, I promise, you'll be the first to know. So, talk to me about these boxes.”

“That's another spreadsheet. Also on the computer. Hold up, it's right here.”

I took a breath as he fumbled with the software. I knew I could find and open what he was looking for in a matter of seconds. But I could only understand the business with Pat's help, and the business was more than a spreadsheet. Much more. I looked closely at the nearest crate and noticed a number written in marker on the upper right-hand corner.

“Here it is.” I walked around to look at the spreadsheet with him. Sure enough, the crate number was there, along with the clocks that were listed inside. The clock numbers from the database were also included. I realized that the data was all in the same place. I ached to scroll through at a quicker pace, but I patiently let Pat show me how it worked.

“So, if we look in this crate, for example, we should find three banjo clocks, two mantel clocks, and a Vienna wall clock. All from the Winter estate. Should we test the theory?”

“Sure.” I was thrilled to see that the crate did, indeed, include those very clocks. I wanted desperately to examine each timepiece more closely, to turn them over in my hands, but there would be time for that later.

I looked around and thought about how best to rearrange things to create enough space to do some work while maintaining some of the order out of the chaos.

“Pat, what do you think about us moving the grandfathers over to that wall?” I pointed to the blank wall on the far side
of the shop. “And then moving the crates over there? The clocks are taking up a lot of space, but it's not easy to work on them from back there. I think we need to figure out a game plan for them first, don't you?”

“Sounds like a plan. Let me get the dolly. Are you going to get changed?”

I looked down at my black leggings and black tunic. I took off my belt and then the borrowed plaid shirt, folding both of them over the chair. My Doc Martens boots were my go-to shoes for everything, and excellent work boots. “No, good to go.”

I walked over to the grandfather clocks to get a better look at them. Most of them were missing their pendulums and weights, though there were several of each lined up nearby. We cleared wall space first and then moved each one over. We placed them in a pattern that took up the least amount of floor space while giving us enough room to walk around so we could work on them. My hands itched to reassemble each one, to see if they worked. Were they stopped because they ran down or were they stopped because they needed repair? Grandfather clocks were a delicate balance of movement and required many pieces. I promised myself this would be the last time I moved them if I could help it.

“Ruthie, see here? The blue tape on each weight and pendulum? The clocks are labeled A, B, C, and so on. Pendulums are labeled. And the weights are AR, AC, AL, for right, center, and left.”

There was a stack of towels on one of the side tables. I took one, put it in front of clock C, and found its missing parts.

“We're missing the guts for clock E,” I said, turning to scan every surface in the room for the parts one more time.

“Grover's Folly,” Pat said.

“Grover's Folly?”

“Sorry. That's what Thom called it. Grover Winter left it to your grandfather specifically; we didn't buy it with the others. At first, we thought it was a joke, since the old girl had been gutted and it was all electric. There was a pendulum, though. Wonder where that got to?” he said as he straightened a pile of crates against the wall.

A little alarm went off in my brain and it must have showed on my face.

“Ruth? What is it?”

“Nothing,” I said slowly, considering. “So tell me, was it a joke gift?”

“No, far from it. This was the Chairman's safe. Hidden pockets with notes. Puzzle drawers that only opened at a certain time of day. Two false bottoms.”

“Any hidden treasures?”

“Well, we did find a sea clock, a beauty, a perfect replica of the original Harrison design. We found it in one of the false bottoms.”

“The clock wasn't the real thing?”

“Alas, no. Boy, that would be something. From what we could tell, most of the Winter estate was replicas. Good replicas, but replicas. The clock had a note in the case from Grover that said, ‘This is the key to it all' or something like that.”

“John Harrison was a great clockmaker. Maybe G.T. was working on his own copy of a Harrison?”

“Nope, not that he mentioned. And he would have mentioned it.”

“What does it mean?”

“No idea. We have no idea. Thom kept it, brought it home
to look at it more closely, but he didn't find anything. We looked all over the case—didn't find anything else.”

“I really look forward to looking at it more closely later. But let's keep organizing. How about if we check each crate and then stack them over along that side of the shop? We can mark where they all are.”

“Sounds good. Want me to call over to Caroline's to see if she can help us out?”

“I think we can do it. I'm pretty tall and we can use the stepladder if we need to,” I said, not relishing the thought of spending more time with Caroline Adler than I already had to.

We moved the smaller crates from the top of the large ones first. Pat handed them to me and I stacked them to the side of the shop, looking at the markings and checking them against the inventory sheet. Pat was right, they weren't heavy. But there were a lot of them. We got into a routine very quickly.